Can Scottish Labour pull off an election victory?

After decades in the shadows, members of the Scottish Labour party are back out in the open, their confidence growing. Emboldened first by polls signalling the very real prospect of Sir Keir Starmer becoming the next prime minister, Scottish Labour politicians now watch with tastefully concealed glee as the SNP – under the stewardship of new leader Humza Yousaf – sinks into deepening crisis.

The mood in the party – which is led in Scotland by 40-year-old Anas Sarwar – has, says a senior source, changed completely. ‘It’s like night and day. When Anas Sarwar became leader in 2021, people might sidle up to him at events and whisper good wishes, now they’re happy to be open about their support.

‘Anas and Keir did an event for business leaders in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago and more than 150 people came along. Two years ago, we’d have been lucky if 15 had signed up.’

During the 2014 independence referendum campaign, the SNP so successfully characterised Labour as ‘red Tories’ to be despised that there were genuine concerns for the then-leader Ed Miliband’s safety when he visited Edinburgh to campaign for a ‘No’ vote. Now, Starmer racks up his frequent flyer points with regular trips north of the border.

‘Keir’s been up five times this year, so far,’ says a source, ‘and once the English local elections are out of the way in May, he’ll be back a lot more. We need to get to the point where it’s unremarkable for him to come. He wants to be prime minister of the whole UK so we can’t have trips to Scotland being seen like state visits. We need to get to the point where the news is “Starmer was in Glasgow today” rather that “Starmer was in Scotland”. There’s a real difference between those two narratives.’

Labour has struggled in recent years to counter election campaign attacks from both the SNP and the Conservatives. The Scottish nationalists’ line has been that, since polling has predicted Labour defeats, only a vote for the SNP can mitigate against the Tories. Meanwhile, as per that famous attack ad showing Ed Miliband tucked into Alex Salmond’s breast pocket, the Tories have argued that, in order to form a working government, Labour would be required to cook-up a coalition deal with the SNP.

Scottish Labour strategists are no longer worried about these lines of attack. ‘The nationalists,’ said one senior figure, ‘can’t go on the idea that Labour can’t win. People aren’t stupid. They can see the polling that shows Keir’s in a strong position.

‘Those Tory posters showing Ed in Salmond’s pocket cost us more votes in England than they did in Scotland. They worked to the extent they did because people knew who Salmond was. The Tories aren’t going to get the same cut through with posters of Humza Yousaf, are they?’

Just three weeks into his leadership of the SNP, Yousaf has more pressing matters to deal with than planning the next general election campaign. Each day brings new – sometimes bizarre and always damaging – details about a police investigation into the SNP’s finances while relentless briefing from within his party ranks shows he’s far from adored by SNP members.

Right now, it’s difficult to imagine what a successful SNP campaign message might look like. The party’s president, Mike Russell, is on record as saying not only that independence cannot be delivered at present but that the SNP hasn’t figured out how it might be delivered at all. While the party’s track record in government at Holyrood is conspicuously light on success stories.

And yet despite the chaos which has followed the departure of Nicola Sturgeon from the SNP leadership, polls show the nationalists remain on course to win the largest number of seats in Scotland at the next general election.

‘So far,’ says a senior source, ‘Keir has done a good job of impressing businesses in Scotland and the middle-class but he has a way to go yet with working-class voters who still have some doubts. It’s pretty ironic, really, given he’s from the most authentically working-class background of any party leader since John Major was in charge of the Tories. But he’ll keep at it, letting Scots know who he is and what he stands for.’

While Scottish Labour sees opportunities to take back as many as 20 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies, there remains, however, work yet to do.